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In a happy turn for many, many pet collecting hunters out there, the new patch 5.3 PTR has 50 stable slots for hunter pets. That’s 50 slots in the stable, plus your five active pet slots, allowing hunters to collect as many as 55 different pets.

This change is a bit of a turnaround from Blizzard comments during Mists of Pandaria, but is also fairly unsurprising given the huge volume of hunters pressing for more stable slots (plus the fact that there are currently more taming challenge pets than there are stable slots).

As always, this is just the PTR, and in fact is an incredibly early version of the PTR, so it’s subject to change at any time. However, I suspect that this one is likely going to stay — Blizzard surely doesn’t want the wrath of all those hunters who’d feel cheated if they were teased with double the pet slots and then had it yanked away.

Great comment from Arth below:

Well shit. Min. range is gone, our specs are fairly well-tuned and are all viable, we aren’t terrible in PvP, and now this. What the hell are we supposed to complain about?

— too many buttons and shot homogenization is the only thing I can really think of.

I know! I’ve just returned to WoW after a long break (half of Cata, which I didn’t care for much). I’m liking MoP so far, but I’m pretty disappointed in the rare pet choices. I love the new tracking rares system, but I don’t know… none of the new pet models really appeal to me. Anyone else find this?

Is OK Arth – we can still find things to complain about – how about Growl/taunt? And you know, it doesn’t have to be rational for us to complain. I’m sure we can have our hissy fits about nothing important too! :D

I have a hard time complaining about that one. Throughout the history of WoW growl was not a taunt, but for a brief moment from 5.0.4 to 5.1 we had a pet taunt that worked on bosses. Now we’re back to where we were, except we have a taunt that works on most mobs. It still seems like a step up.

We managed to extreme solo bosses for years without a pet taunt, and I imagine we’ll continue to do so. As for pet tanking, a BM pet with MD can still do a pretty good job of holding aggro, on par with what we’ve always had (actually better than Wrath-era).

What Blizz wants is simple: they don’t want pets to be able to taunt current raid bosses. There is too much danger that a special mechanic boss will come out that can be trivialized by pet avoidance.

The easy way to deal with this is just to make all bosses pet taunt immune. Just isn’t worth their time to flip the switches one by one on all the old bosses, or to design every new boss around pet taunt/avoidance mechanics.

This might make me fully come out of retirement. I’m a sentimentalist when it comes to pets. I still have Charlotte my forest spider from outside Goldshire. She’s about as old as the game is (soon after Christmas, 2004!).

Now if only we’d have a reason to use pets with funky powers in a raid. I’m thinking of a way to switch out pet abilities like we do glyphs or talents. That way, I could have a scorpid that brings the crit buff or a direhorn with spell haste. I love that we can fit the pet to the buffs that our raid groups need, but there’s whole families of pets that I’ve never even bothered to tame because their buffs are covered or they bring PvP-style debuffs that I’d never need. Maybe next expansion :)

As for the bitch list, fix my pet so it doesn’t decide its bitten the mob long enough now, we’ll drag them back for you, Mom. I notice it alot with my porcupine. Her stun often sends here scurrying back my way, followed by the beast, and then the mobs. I would also like to see my pet used as CC again. Let me put the pet on an add so I can help with the boss or bail out the clothie.

There is always something to complain about, if not about hunters’ state, then about general blizzard policy.

Like taking ages for sensible fixes (minimum range was bad mechanic since day one), bad, very slowly improving, default interface.
I don’t understand why do I have to search and install a separate mod for as simple thing as mouse scroll zooming on minimup or selling junk (which has no reason to be in the game in the first place) or automatic repair of my gear, or revealing the map and making in not take the whole screen, or simple key-mapping of the action bars….
List goes on forever, and it feels like WoW just doesn’t want to be a good game.
There are, of course, improvements, but each time they come I think to myself “jesus, this is so simple, why didn’t they do it earlier?”, like adding quest tracker.